6 Tips for Improving Your Beer Brewing Yield

If you find that you’re having a lot of trouble with only getting disappointingly low yields from your brewing process, you’re experiencing a very common situation. Low brewing yields boil down to a lack of efficiency in the preliminary steps of brewing. Here are a few tips for increasing brewing efficiency and improving your beer brewing yield that you might not have known about.

Use Only Fresh Ingredients

While it seems rather obvious, you should always check and make sure that your brewing ingredients are as fresh as they can be. Older ingredients are far more oxidized, and they can lead to a very inefficient brew. The best yield you can get comes from the freshest grain available. If you’re repitching yeast, you’ll want to keep it in a yeast brink until you’re ready to start so that you can preserve its unique properties.

Mill Your Grain Finer

While many issues with brewing yield can link back to a grain that was ground too coarse, you don’t want to overdue the grind either. A coarse grind will lead to a huge drop in efficiency, and you’ll hardly make a true beer. But grind the grains too fine, and you might end up with a stuck mash. Finding the perfect middle ground is key.

Use Hot Water To Mash Out or Sparge

Wort is quite sticky and loves to clump together. This is not what we want to happen when beer brewing. You can allow your wort to move a little more freely by using hot water when it comes time to mash out or sparge your mix. This also prevents the mash from losing important heat.

Reduce Dead Space Losses

Losing part of your wort is very easy if you aren’t careful. Whenever you transfer your mash using a transfer line or pump, you introduce more places where you can lose mash to dead space inside of these items. Less mash means reduced efficiency and a lower yield in the end.

Sparge the Mash Slowly

A useful tip for improving beer brewing yield that many beginners don’t know until they make the mistake is to sparge your mash quite slowly. You want to give the water enough time to extract those sugars from your grain bed. Your sparging step should introduce the water at more of a trickling pace.

Monitor Mash Temperature Closely

Some brewers forget that adding the mash to hot water will cause it to lower the water’s temperature. Even if you raise the water to the temperature that you want your mash to be at, adding the mash will bring that temperature down. Raise the water temperature by a few degrees more than your target temperature, and it will be perfect once you add the grain in.

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